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STRAIGHT BUT BENT, THE FLAMING LIPS PAINT WIND BACK WEDNESDAY WILD AND FREE AND PINK

Wayne Coyne in the fog of life as usual at a Flaming Lips show.
Wayne Coyne in the fog of life as usual at a Flaming Lips show.


Oklahoma’s best reason to travel there, though not necessarily with your full faculties, The Flaming Lips begin a quick tour of Australia tomorrow, playing in full the album Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots.


Expect loved-up rooms, dark stories in bright shapes, and community built around a shared ethos. But not, as Wayne Coyne explains in this story from 2004, the first tour after the release of Yoshimi … in 2002, any stimulants that might attract the attention of constable plod or tut-tutting premiers.


Really? Nothing? Have you seen what goes on on stage at their shows??? Ah, yes, but it’s amazing what you can do with will, big balloons and joy, as you will see at the end with a link to a review of one of those 2004 shows.


Read on advises Wind Back Wednesday.

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WAYNE COYNE IS POLITE, REFINED and charming. When not on stage as the centrepiece of Oklahoma trio the Flaming Lips he often can be found in elegant suits, his pepper and salt hair curly and bohemian in a stylish way. He’s married and well read, an intelligent man who despite being in the same band for 20 years has easily made it into his 40s without public humiliation.


So why do people think he’s mad or on seriously good drugs - or both?


Could it be his on-stage penchant for wearing bunny suits, pouring blood over himself and operating hand puppets while the Lips (Coyne, Steven Drozd and Michael Ivins) make dramatic, romantic and sometimes utterly beautiful music that only Mercury Rev can match?

Or is it songs that canvass the use (or non-use) of jelly, have titles such as Race For The Prize (Sacrifice Of The New Scientists) and fill a semi-concept album about a young Japanese girl fighting pink robots?



Or maybe it’s a voice that seems permanently filled with wonder and enjoying the myriad pleasures of life even when singing about death? A voice that can make you feel you’re hearing for the first time a line as liable to cliché as “do you realise you have the most beautiful face”.


“I sometimes think there must be some tone in my voice,” says Coyne. “When I get excited I do go up in my register and you feel a kind of enthusiasm or something in there. I remember when me and Stephen [Drozd] arrived at the simplicity of the line you mention we were baffled in the same way the audience is: you know that really is so simple it almost sounds like it shouldn’t work, it almost sounds like it’s too dumb to be saying something. But I think it does speak of the power of music in general that it makes what you’re saying flow along and puts meaning and gives it more depth than language does alone.


“I must admit I don’t always feel comfortable singing about things like sex and drugs and stuff like that and sometimes I quite like singing about things that may seem stupid in somebody else’s hands but I’ve found a way to sing it where we don’t’ feel stupid saying it.”


If Coyne doesn’t feel comfortable singing about sex and drugs there must be some perverse pleasure or just irony in a band that doesn’t take hallucinogenic drugs being so popular with those who do?


“We began in 1983 and I think in the beginning it’s not that we took a lot of drugs, we exaggerated the amount of drugs we took so we would have some basis by which to make this ridiculous music we were making,” Coyne explains. “I think people never want to believe that you’re just thinking of weird stuff; that there must have been damage of the chromosomes that urges you into this sort of magical thinking.



“Luckily people think because I’m in a band called the Flaming Lips and I’m from Oklahoma and sometimes the song titles alone they say ‘ok you say you don’t do drugs, whatever’. I accept that now because it allows me some kind of freedom to be a freak. I want to do strange unknown things for the sheer joy of doing it and if I’m labelled a weirdo along the way, I’ll take that.”


A weirdo? For putting on a stage show that Drozd once described thus: “Imagine Dark Side Of The Moon-era Pink Floyd with The Wizard Of Oz with Wayne Newton in Las Vegas and The Butthole Surfers in 1987. We’ve got fucking animals onstage, we’ve got confetti cannons, we’ve got smoke machines and Wayne’s got a strobe light he wears as a fucking necklace.”? Surely not.


“I think what it does is it tends to break down some kind of resistance that you might have,” says Coyne of The Flaming Lips on stage. “Seeing people in animal costumes, I don’t know what it does but for some reason it makes people think ‘you know if these people are going to be up there in animal costumes making fools of themselves what do I have to stand here and be cool? Why do I have to sit here as judge this as being over the top or [wonder] why are these people happy?’


“I don’t want you to be cool, I want you to freak out and enjoy this thing while it’s happening. If we do it first within a couple of songs the audience breaks down and they’ll sing stupid songs like Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots with us rather than being passively entertained by it.”


 

 

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The Flaming Lips play:

 AEC Theatre, Adelaide – January 30

Festival Hall, Melbourne – February 1

Hordern Pavilion, Sydney – February 2

 Fortitude Music Hall, Brisbane – February 5

 

 

 

 

 

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